As life expectancy is at an all-time high, this type of research has become an international priority offering enormous potential to support individuals, communities, clinicians and policy makers.

Our Professor of e-Health Innovation and Head of Research, Theo Arvanitis, Dr Timothy Robbins and Dr Sarah Lim Choi Keung, worked alongside experts at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire to establish the extent to which current research literature considers e-health-based and telemedicine-based active ageing interventions.

Researchers at our Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH) have been working, with the health and fitness app Sweatcoin, to develop a new verification process that will now allow indoor steps to be tracked for the first time.

Sweatcoin monitors steps throughout the day, via an app downloaded to a smartphone. Users are rewarded with one Sweatcoin (SWC) per every 1,000 steps. The digital currency can then be redeemed for items including magazines, clothing, music downloads and even televisions.

Previously the app was only capable of tracking outdoor steps - a big disadvantage for those with active jobs indoors or even those using the gym.

The 12-month project, funded by Innovate UK, collected large amounts of data from the sensors built into smartphones in parallel with step-count data recorded using high accuracy activity monitors. Researchers on the project then used this data to create a new step-verification model to work in any environment, not just outdoors.

It was announced today, Thursday 26th April 2018, that Dame Julie Moore, currently Chief Executive of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB), is to become a Professor of Healthcare Systems at WMG, University of Warwick. Her new role will see her leading on a range of both research and education projects, leading collaborations with the NHS and other healthcare providers.

Dame Julie has held the position of Honorary Professor, at WMG, since 2013. In that time she has delivered three thought provoking and informative special lectures covering topics such as ‘Is the NHS Succeeding or Failing?’

“This is a stellar appointment. Nursing Times has described Dame Julie one of the best leaders in the NHS, and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour has named her as one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK. I have no doubt that her new research role here with us in WMG at the University of Warwick will result in transformative research that will help enhance the delivery of healthcare across the UK.”

On Thursday 3rd May 2018, the Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH) at WMG, University of Warwick, will be hosting the Digital Health & Care and Safety of Connected Health: Improvements & Applications Conference (DICOH’18).

WMG, at the University of Warwick, is a key partner in the Midlands site helping to deliver a £30 million project by Health Data Research UK, to address challengingUKhealthcare issues using data science, which is looking at making game-changing improvements in people’s health by harnessing data science at scale across the UK.

WMG will be part of the “Midlands HDR UK Substantive Site”, which will tackle the challenge of how to make NHS data more useable and accessible for research; and will develop, evaluate and apply appropriate analytical tools to NHS data in real time in order to inform decision making and improve health for both the patient and population. The Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH), WMG will lead the Warwick part of the programme, together with colleagues from Warwick Medical School and Warwick’s Mathematics Institute.

Care for patients with multimorbid chronic conditions could be transformed by a new cloud infrastructure to be developed at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Digital Healthcare based at WMG, as part of a European project.

The system called C3-Cloud, which is led by the Institute of Digital Healthcare aims to transform current care models which are mostly fragmented, addressing chronic conditions in isolation. The researchers have been awarded EUR 5 Million to lead pilots of the system in three countries. Funded by EU Horizon 2020, 12 partners in seven countries are combining their expertise to improve care provided to patients with multimorbidity.

Patients with multimorbidity, have two or chronic conditions such as diabetes, dementia and arthritis which makes treatment more complicated and has become more prevalent among older adults as mortality rates have declined and the population has aged.

The initiative is part of the National Tommy’s Centre for Early Miscarriage Care and Research (NEMC) which is the first in the UK - and the largest in Europe. The University of Warwick has been chosen as a partner, together with the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London. The NEMC is funded by Tommy's, the baby and pregnancy charity

The team at IDH is led by Professor Theo Arvanitis, Chair in e-Health Innovation and Head of Research. He said: “Around 250,000 miscarriages occur every year, and roughly a third of women suffer more than one of these traumatic events. We'll also be creating a national database, initially by taking information from all three centres.

Xbox Kinects could be used in the future to assess the health of patients with conditions such as cystic fibrosis. Normally found in the hands of gamers rather than medics the Microsoft sensors could be used to assess the respiratory function of patients.

Researchers at the Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, University of Warwick and the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing, University of Birmingham and Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust (HEFT) have developed a method of using the devices. The system consists of four Kinect sensors which are capable of quickly creating a 3D image of a patient’s torso. This enables physicians to measure and assess how a chest wall moves. In tests it has proven to be as accurate as a patient breathing into a spirometer - the current method used - but providing additional information about the movement of the chest, which could help in identifying numerous respiratory problems.

The project lead, Dr Chris Golby at the Institute of Digital Healthcare, said: “We have developed a low-cost prototype which provides a more comprehensive measurement of a patient’s breathing than existing methods.”

The University of Warwick has been selected to be a partner in the largest miscarriage research centre in Europe.

Funded by the leading pregnancy charity, Tommy’s, researchers from the Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH) and Warwick Medical School (WMS), will be joining doctors from University Hospital, Coventry to investigate the causes of early miscarriage.

The Institute of Digital Healthcare, at the University of Warwick, will develop a clinical database, led by Professor Theo Arvanitis, to support the work of the Centre and improve on outcomes based on information-driven approaches.

The 2nd annual WMG Doctoral Research and Innovation Conference, entitled ‘Innovation through Collaboration’, is an excellent opportunity to showcase research from both academia and industry across themes in design, materials, manufacturing, systems and business transformation.

Organised by doctoral students, the conference will be held in the International Digital Laboratory on 30th June - 1st July, with an evening social event on the 30th.

Papers and poster presentations will take place across a wide variety of topics and awards will be presented in each theme.